For most of the last decade, Southeast Asia’s fintech story was told through consumer-facing apps. Grab’s superapp ambitions, GoTo’s ride-hailing-to-fintech pivot, Sea’s Shopee-to-SeaMoney flywheel. It was a story about reach: who could put a wallet in the most pockets across a region still short on bank branches.

The Asia FinTech Awards 2026 tell a different story. This year’s biggest winners weren’t the apps consumers open every day. They were the plumbing that other financial institutions and fintechs quietly build on top of. Finmo, a Singapore-based treasury operating system, took home the top overall prize, “FinTech of the Year,” beating nine finalists at the awards ceremony in Singapore on August 21, 2026 [PR Newswire/Manila Times]. StraitsX, the stablecoin infrastructure firm behind XSGD and XUSD, walked away with three separate recognitions: Fintech Partner of the Year, Best Employer of the Year, and Director of the Year for CEO Tianwei Liu [StraitsX].

Two companies, three categories, and a pattern worth examining: the region’s most recognized fintechs this year aren’t the ones consumers interact with directly.

From Superapps to Substrate

Finmo’s pitch is deliberately unglamorous: connected intelligence and control for the modern CFO, unifying global payments, multi-currency cash management, forecasting, and FX visibility for finance teams managing multiple entities and currencies across borders. As co-founder and CEO David Hanna put it upon accepting the award, “Global finance teams have spent too long working across disconnected payment, banking and treasury systems. We believe the future is one intelligent operating system that enables smarter payments and connects how businesses move, manage and understand their money, giving finance teams greater visibility, control and confidence” [PR Newswire/Manila Times].

That framing points at something structural. Finmo’s Treasury Operating System brings together data from bank accounts, accounting platforms, and ERP systems into a single layer, then lets finance teams act on it directly through payments, liquidity management, and FX execution. It’s built for finance teams at cross-border businesses, not designed to be consumer-facing. The company is now licensed across eight jurisdictions, including Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Canada, the US, the UK, and Dubai, with backing from PayPal Ventures, Citi Ventures, and Quona Capital [PR Newswire/Manila Times]. A treasury-infrastructure company that started in Singapore is now operating with the geographic reach of a global bank’s cash management arm, minus the balance sheet.

The judges’ rationale reinforced the infrastructure framing over any single flashy feature. Jessica Crompton, Partnerships Manager at Fintech Intel, which runs the Asia FinTech Awards, said Finmo “impressed the judges with its vision, innovation and ability to deliver meaningful impact at scale” [PR Newswire/Manila Times]. Notably, the criteria she cited, product-market fit, critical mass receptivity, differentiation, and innovativeness, are enterprise infrastructure metrics, not user-growth metrics. Nine finalists competed for the title; Finmo’s win over a shortlist that size suggests the category itself, treasury and cross-border cash operations, has become genuinely competitive terrain rather than a niche.

StraitsX’s arc is similar, if longer. It began in 2015 as Xfers, a payments company plugging into Southeast Asia’s notoriously inefficient bank transfer rails, and only found its current identity gradually. StraitsX became the first fintech in Singapore to be granted a widely accepted stored value facility license, which allowed it to scale operations under MAS’s e-money framework [Asia Tech Podcast]. XSGD, the world’s first Singapore dollar stablecoin, launched in 2020. Years of quiet work embedding itself as settlement infrastructure for crypto exchanges followed, well before “stablecoin” became a boardroom word.

As CEO Tianwei Liu put it at the Singapore FinTech Festival 2025: “At our core, we are a payment infrastructure company. People know us for our stablecoins today, but those who have worked with us over the years know us as one of the main payment infrastructure providers for cryptocurrency exchanges across Asia Pacific” [The Asian Banker].

The company’s own numbers back this up. Stablecoin-backed card transaction volume grew 40x between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025, with card issuance up 83x over the same period [CoinDesk]. That growth looks like habitual daily spending, groceries, restaurants, department stores, rather than speculative crypto activity. StraitsX now acts as a Visa BIN sponsor, enabling partners like RedotPay, which alone processed over $2.95 billion in card volume in 2025, to issue cards on top of its rails [CoinDesk]. Cumulative stablecoin transaction volume through StraitsX’s infrastructure has reached nearly $30 billion [CoinDesk]. As Liu described the company’s ambition to CoinDesk: “No user cares about whether a payment runs on stablecoins or fiat; they only care if the payment goes through.” He wants stablecoin infrastructure to work like fiber-optic cable: everywhere, and unnoticed.

Neither company sells to consumers directly. Both sell trust, uptime, and compliance to the institutions consumers actually interact with.

The Company They Keep

Zoom out to the rest of the awards landscape and the pattern holds. CNBC and Statista’s 2026 ranking of the world’s top fintech companies put five Singapore-based digital asset infrastructure firms on the list: StraitsX, Triple-A, Amber Group, ChainUp, and Crypto.com [Asian Banking & Finance]. That’s a stablecoin and digital-asset cluster large enough to count as a genuine category rather than a handful of outliers. The same ranking placed nine Singapore-based payments firms on the list, including Ant International, Grab Financial Group, KPay, HitPay, Atome, Thunes, Tazapay, YouTrip, and Sunrate [Asian Banking & Finance]. Singapore logged 25 companies on the overall list, the fourth-highest count globally, spread across payments, wealthtech (Endowus, StashAway, Syfe, Tiger Brokers), and alternative financing (Funding Societies, Choco Up).

The broader Asian Banking & Finance Fintech Awards 2026 tell a similar story at regional scale. Enterprise payments and cross-border settlement categories are now as crowded as consumer-facing ones: Sunrate took the Enterprise Payments Award for Singapore, MatchMove won the Fintech Infrastructure Award for the Philippines, TerraPay collected a Financial Inclusion Award for Singapore, and M-DAQ-adjacent cross-border and FX players featured prominently across multiple jurisdictions [Asian Banking & Finance]. Consumer apps like ShopeePay (which won Payments Solution Award – Singapore and swept mobile app and ecosystem categories across Malaysia and Thailand) and Singlife (Customer Experience Solution Award and Mobile App Award, Singapore) still won plenty of hardware. But this year’s list is weighted more heavily toward B2B financial infrastructure across enterprise payments, RegTech, digital identity verification, and cross-border settlement than in previous cycles [Asian Banking & Finance].

Why the Plumbing Is Where the Interesting Money Is

Consumer fintech in Southeast Asia moved through its first major growth wave quickly: wallets, buy-now-pay-later, and digital banking licenses were largely raced to and claimed within a five-year window. What’s left is a harder, less winner-take-all problem: how do you actually move money, in real time, compliantly, across a region with a dozen currencies, uneven banking rails, and regulators moving at different speeds? That’s a problem infrastructure companies can solve once and sell many times over, to banks, to fintechs, and increasingly, to software itself.

StraitsX’s own trajectory illustrates why regulatory alignment, not just technical capability, has become the moat. Liu has described the company’s approach as resting on three pillars: adherence to regulation, partnerships with licensed banks, and real-world use cases. “Striving to be fully compliant with local regulations is a journey, not a switch,” he told The Asian Banker, crediting the Monetary Authority of Singapore for being “extremely forward-looking” in engaging with the company as it scaled [The Asian Banker]. That regulatory groundwork now underpins concrete banking partnerships. “Our partnerships with banks like DBS and Standard Chartered give users access to on- and off-ramps connecting blockchain assets with the traditional financial system,” Liu said, adding that these relationships ensure StraitsX’s stablecoins remain fully backed by regulated reserves and redeemable through licensed banking channels [The Asian Banker].

That trust has translated into visible production use, not just pilot programs. StraitsX’s partnership with Grab and Alipay+ allows consumers in Singapore to pay at Grab merchants using their preferred e-wallets, with each transaction settled instantly in XSGD behind the scenes. “It shows why domestic stablecoins are important,” Liu said. “They allow instant settlement and remove foreign exchange risk. Traditional systems can take days to clear, but stablecoins combine both payment and settlement in one step” [The Asian Banker]. StraitsX is also a participant in MAS-led digital money pilots, having been involved since the early stages of Project Orchid and now contributing to BLOOM, an industry initiative that includes DBS, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, UOB, Circle, and Temasek [The Asian Banker].

That last point is where StraitsX’s roadmap gets genuinely interesting. Liu has been explicit about the direction of travel: “AI will bring about generative payments. Machines or digital agents will be able to initiate transactions under set parameters. That’s machine-to-machine and agent-to-agent finance, enabled by programmable money” [The Asian Banker]. In practice, that’s meant launching XSGD and XUSD on Solana, a move Liu described as bringing together “centralised exchange support, AMM liquidity, lending pools and everyday payments on a single high-performance chain” [The Asian Banker]. It’s early, deliberate positioning in a category that’s still mostly speculative, and a small slice of the business today. It’s also the kind of forward bet infrastructure players can afford to make while app-layer companies stay focused on this quarter’s user growth.

Finmo’s own positioning, connected intelligence and control for the modern CFO, points at a related idea from the enterprise side. As finance teams need to reconcile payments, cash positions, and FX exposure in real time across borders, the treasury layer becomes the place where that intelligence has to live. Not the ERP, not the bank portal, but a unifying operating layer above both.

Two Different Paths to the Same Conclusion

What’s notable is that Finmo and StraitsX arrived at similar strategic postures from opposite starting points. Finmo built for the enterprise finance function first: multi-entity treasury visibility, FX management, cash forecasting, then layered payments execution on top, with AI-driven insight as the connective tissue. StraitsX built the payment rail first, stablecoin issuance and settlement, then worked backward into becoming the compliant, bank-integrated infrastructure that other institutions, from crypto exchanges to card issuers to super-apps, could plug into without having to solve blockchain settlement themselves.

Both companies have concluded that the winning position in Southeast Asian fintech in 2026 isn’t owning the customer relationship. It’s owning the layer other companies’ products quietly depend on. Finmo doesn’t need to be the app a founder opens every morning; it needs to be the system their finance team can’t operate without. StraitsX doesn’t need consumers to know they’re transacting in XSGD when they tap to pay at a Grab merchant; it needs the settlement to be instant and invisible.

The Takeaway

Grab Financial Group, ShopeePay, and Singlife remain major players with hundreds of millions of users across the region. But this year’s most recognized fintechs point to where new value is concentrating: less in who can acquire the most users, and more in who can become infrastructure for everyone else, including banks, fintechs, and potentially, autonomous software agents making purchases on someone else’s behalf.

For investors and founders watching Southeast Asia’s fintech sector, the 2026 awards cycle offers a useful signal that’s easy to miss if you’re only tracking headline funding rounds. The region’s most valuable fintech real estate is no longer necessarily the app on a consumer’s home screen. It is increasingly the treasury layer a CFO logs into once a day and the settlement rail nobody ever sees at all. StraitsX and Finmo didn’t win in 2026 because they built better apps. They built the parts everyone else now depends on.

References:

1. PR Newswire / Manila Times — “Finmo wins FinTech of the Year at the Asia FinTech Awards 2026” (Aug 26, 2026)
2. Yahoo Finance Singapore — “Finmo wins FinTech of the Year at the Asia FinTech Awards 2026” (Aug 25, 2026)
3. Asian Banking & Finance — “Which Singapore fintechs are amongst the world’s best in 2026?”
4. Asian Banking & Finance — “Asia’s fintech innovators take centre stage at Asian Banking & Finance Fintech Awards 2026”
5. The Asian Banker — “StraitsX builds the rails for real-world stablecoin payments” (Singapore FinTech Festival 2025 interview with Tianwei Liu)
6. CoinDesk — “Stablecoin payments go ‘invisible’ in Southeast Asia as crypto card business surges” (March 29, 2026)
7. The Asian Banker — “StraitsX to roll out XSGD and XUSD stablecoins on Solana in 2026”
8. StraitsX — LinkedIn announcement, Asia FinTech Awards 2026 wins (Fintech Partner of the Year, Best Employer of the Year, Director of the Year: Tianwei Liu)
9. Fintech Awards Asia — 2026 Winners page (fintechawardsasia.com/2026-winners)
10. Asia Tech Podcast — “Will Blockchain Make Banks Obsolete? — Tianwei Liu, co-Founder and CEO of StraitsX” (Ep. 338)